When Israeli lawmakers handed a deeply contentious regulation final Monday to weaken the Supreme Court, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t linger within the voting chamber to have fun.

Instead, the justice minister, Yariv Levin, an architect of the laws, stayed to pose for selfies with fellow lawmakers as Mr. Netanyahu walked somberly from the room. Mr. Levin, not the prime minister, made a celebratory speech from the rostrum.

“We have made the first step in the important historic process of repairing the justice system,” Mr. Levin mentioned. The prime minister was not there to listen to him.

To the world, Mr. Netanyahu — Israel’s longest-serving chief — is the face of his authorities’s judicial overhaul, a multipart effort that has already restricted the Supreme Court’s affect over lawmakers and will but give the federal government extra management over who sits on the courtroom.

In Israel, the regulation’s major champion has been Mr. Levin, whose solemn demeanor conceals a inflexible perception in sweeping judicial change. His affect inside Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition has raised questions concerning the prime minister’s true grip on energy and aroused hypothesis that Mr. Levin may someday succeed him.

For most of his profession, Mr. Netanyahu was a proponent of judicial independence, and adjusted place solely after being investigated for corruption in 2017 and positioned on trial three years later, a prosecution that continues at this time. But Mr. Levin entered politics to reshape the judiciary, making it the topic of his maiden speech to Parliament in 2009.

“It’s something that Yariv Levin was dreaming of for decades,” mentioned Simcha Rothman, a fellow lawmaker within the coalition and one other architect of the regulation.

Mr. Levin’s reputation inside Mr. Netanyahu’s get together, Likud, helps to clarify why the prime minister has charged forward with the overhaul, regardless of setting off maybe the gravest home disaster in Israeli historical past — upsetting road unrest, mass resignations inside the military reserve, fears amongst investors and large rifts in society.

Mr. Levin’s upbringing amongst outstanding right-wing leaders helps illustrate the historic grievances that compound these social tensions. And his extra speedy motivations for searching for judicial change present why the standoff has change into a proxy for a much wider dispute over construct a state that’s each Jewish and democratic.

Throughout his 14 years in Parliament, Mr. Levin has constantly proposed overhauling the courtroom’s membership and diminishing its position as a result of, in his view, it doesn’t prioritize Israel’s Jewish character.

As a secular Jew, his animus differs from that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies, who resent the courtroom for opposing the monetary subsidies and exemptions from navy service that some governments have awarded their neighborhood.

Mr. Levin is a hard-line nationalist who opposes Palestinian statehood, and he has condemned the courtroom for making it simpler for Arab households to maneuver to Jewish neighborhoods inside Israel; for evicting Israelis from some Jewish settlements within the occupied territories; and for permitting Palestinians to make use of a significant freeway within the West Bank that was beforehand solely open to Israeli residents.

The courtroom seeks to construct an Israel that’s “no longer a Jewish state under whose aegis a democratic life is lived, but rather a democratic state in which, insofar as is possible, a Jewish life is also lived,” Mr. Levin mentioned in his first speech to Parliament.

“I shall act to restore the justice system to the classic Zionist track,” he added, “so that, in the Jewish-democratic equation, the Jewish character of the state will receive the decisive weight it deserves.”

Mr. Levin, 54, declined a number of interview requests for this text, however associates, allies and former colleagues mentioned that the central tenets of his political outlook have been solid whereas he was an adolescent.

Mr. Levin was born in 1969 in Jerusalem. His “sandak,” Hebrew for godfather, was Menachem Begin, a frontrunner of the Israeli proper who was ostracized for years by the nation’s left-leaning institution till turning into prime minister in 1977.

Mr. Levin’s great-uncle helped command the Altalena, a ship that ferried arms to Mr. Begin’s right-wing Jewish militia throughout the 1948 Arab-Israeli battle. The ship was notoriously wrecked that summer season by the official Israeli armed forces, throughout a tussle for affect within the early weeks of the state’s existence, an episode that continues to be hurtful to the Israeli proper.

By the time Mr. Levin was conscripted to a navy intelligence unit within the late Nineteen Eighties, these unhealed sores had left him resentful of the aristocratic class that dominated the state at Mr. Begin’s expense, based on Yuval Elbashan, a fellow conscript who has remained in shut contact with Mr. Levin for greater than three many years.

“He was against all the elites,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan, now a regulation professor, who shared a room with Mr. Levin. “It’s still their state, in Yariv Levin’s opinion.”

After Mr. Elbashan joined Mr. Levin on the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the place they have been each regulation undergraduates within the early Nineties, he discovered that Mr. Levin’s anger at elites had consolidated into a selected resentment of the Supreme Court. At the time, Parliament had simply passed a law that gave the Supreme Court far greater leeway to strike down future legislation. The courtroom’s prime judges had greeted it with enthusiasm — enraging Mr. Levin.

“He became like a prophet,” Mr. Elbashan recalled.

Mr. Levin started work as a industrial lawyer in 1996, rapidly dovetailing his authorized profession with political activism for Likud. He joined the board of the Israeli Bar Association in 1999, as a part of a various slate led by a left-wing lawyer, Shlomo Cohen, and later grew to become vp.

Even then, Mr. Levin’s antipathy towards the courtroom was clear. After the retirement in 2006 of Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the judge most associated with the expansion of the court’s powers, Mr. Levin persuaded his affiliation colleagues to snub Mr. Barak by scrapping the customized of publishing a ebook in honor of the departing chief justice, mentioned Mr. Cohen, then the affiliation’s president.

“He’s a very honest guy — what you see is what you get,” mentioned Mr. Cohen, who stays in contact with Mr. Levin regardless of their variations. “He was almost obsessively critical of what he erroneously perceived to be judicial activism.”

Mr. Levin’s requires judicial change have been lengthy ignored by extra average members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, together with Mr. Netanyahu himself.

When supplied the justice ministry in 2015, Mr. Levin turned it down as a result of he feared coalition allies would stymie his imaginative and prescient, based on Mr. Elbashan, who spoke to him on the time.

“If he can become minister of justice, but he can’t do what he thinks, he would prefer not to do it,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan.

Mr. Levin’s likelihood lastly arrived final November, when Mr. Netanyahu was re-elected to energy on the helm of an completely right-wing coalition.

Mr. Netanyahu then fashioned a authorities drawn primarily from ultranationalists, settler leaders, ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, and Netanyahu loyalists indignant on the judiciary’s choice to prosecute him for corruption.

Backed by coalition leaders who all had causes to help his imaginative and prescient, Mr. Levin seized the second, unveiling his plan on Jan. 4, only a week into the federal government’s time period.

His preliminary plan would have given the federal government extra management over the collection of Supreme Court judges and allowed Parliament to overrule the courtroom’s choices.

Those proposed modifications set off what has change into one of many longest-lasting mass protest actions in Israeli historical past, forcing Mr. Netanyahu to halt the plan in March towards Mr. Levin’s needs.

They returned in early July with a unique invoice to strip the courtroom of one of many judicial instruments it makes use of to overrule authorities choices. Once once more, it prompted an enormous surge of protest, and there have been hopes among the many opposition that Mr. Netanyahu would once more droop the laws.

But this time, the prime minister appeared unwilling or unable to restrain Mr. Levin.

The justice minister has his personal base amongst Likud members, completed first in Likud’s primaries final yr, and is taken into account a doable future get together chief.

If Mr. Netanyahu halts the overhaul, analysts say it may immediate Mr. Levin’s resignation — probably collapsing the coalition.

Mr. Elbashan, who has helped lead mediation efforts between the federal government and opposition, says the coalition may survive his departure. But Mr. Netanyahu however desires to placate him as a result of he has few extra shrewd or loyal ministers, Mr. Elbashan mentioned.

“If you ask me, Yariv is the one who is in control,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan. “Yariv is very valuable to Netanyahu, so valuable that I’m not sure that Netanyahu can do without him.”

During last-minute efforts to compromise, Mr. Levin, not Mr. Netanyahu, appeared to have the most important say.

Moments earlier than the ultimate vote in Parliament on Monday, the protection minister, Yoav Gallant, one of many authorities’s most average members, pleaded with Mr. Levin to alter his thoughts, live television footage showed.

Mr. Netanyahu watched in close to silence, largely a passive witness.

And Mr. Levin shrugged.

Jonathan Rosen, Hiba Yazbek and Gabby Sobelman contributed analysis.